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Author Topic: DBWI: Death Star fails to destroy Yavin IV  (Read 1252 times)

Zanzetkuken The Great

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DBWI: Death Star fails to destroy Yavin IV
« on: August 17, 2016, 05:38:06 pm »

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While we can all agree that the Rebellion's chances of success in their gambit above Gavin had a very low probability of success, what if they managed to pull it off and destroyed the battlestation?  Do you think we would have taken a different approach with the galaxy than the Tarkin Doctrine?  And how would we have dealt with the Rebellion and the ong?
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Taricus

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Re: DBWI: Death Star fails to destroy Yavin IV
« Reply #1 on: August 17, 2016, 05:57:01 pm »

First off, not trying to pull the death star stunt again. Between the material and manpower lost when that thing blew up trying to build another one would be ruinous. Rather, we'd go back the the basics of imperial might; The imperial navy and imperial army. Only the emperor knows how much this station cost, and trying to build a second one would be disastrous.
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Zanzetkuken The Great

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Re: DBWI: Death Star fails to destroy Yavin IV
« Reply #2 on: August 17, 2016, 06:28:53 pm »

I think the sheer investment in the creation of the tech will prevent it from being dropped entirely, but yeah, I don't think we'd see anything like the Death Star built again in that timeline.  However, I'd think they might follow through with the ideas about reducing the dish size down and stripping down the nonessential components in order to make a siege weapon.  Thing could probably take out capital ships and planetary shields far easier than any other method.  Admittedly, fighters would be a pain to deal with, but just give it an escort and you should be fine.
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Taricus

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Re: DBWI: Death Star fails to destroy Yavin IV
« Reply #3 on: August 17, 2016, 06:40:43 pm »

IF we had a good escort. Now, don't get me wrong the TIE interceptors they're coming out with perform admirably, but we're missing something between them and the larger ships that we'd need to fill in to ensure that we don't have any more problems with those blasted X-wings. And knowing how much those hotshots like their fighters we could expect them to try throwing new models at us like they haven't heard of logistics.

I'd agree that the tech is still useful, you'd just want it on something cheaper in comparison, and ensure there's several of them around so it's not as much of a setback if one gets destroyed.
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Zanzetkuken The Great

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Re: DBWI: Death Star fails to destroy Yavin IV
« Reply #4 on: August 17, 2016, 06:58:02 pm »

Granted, all those considerations are secondary to the main pain.  Alderran's destruction and the disbanding of the Senate.  It was a pain getting through the fallout of that with the Death Star and a shattered Rebellion.  How much worse would it be with a destroyed Death Star and a Rebellion that had pulled off a major victory?  Be on some shaky ground for awhile...
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Culise

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Re: DBWI: Death Star fails to destroy Yavin IV
« Reply #5 on: August 17, 2016, 11:15:22 pm »

Do you think so?  It seems that the strength of the Rebellion has always been in the Rim and various alien traitors.  The Rim has always been very marginal, economically speaking; you have a few rich worlds like Onderon in the Inner Rim or Dac which was a rich shipbuilding center in spite of its peripheral position, but for every Onderon or Dac you have a hundred like Tatooine, Dantooine, Kashyyyk, or Saleucami: agrarian or resource-extraction worlds with very little planetary industry, much less the sort of facilities they'd need to exert any meaningful influence beyond their own orbital spheres.  Now, by contrast, the Rebels only have limited support from a few core worlds like Alderaan and Chandrila, the former of which was already destroyed even before this hypothetical divergence point.  I don't see that changing tremendously in the wake of the destruction of the Death Star, not with the the Imperial Navy still completely intact.  In the absolute worst circumstance where the entire Rim rises up simultaneously in the wake of the loss of the Death Star and somehow cuts off all Imperial Navy elements in the Rim, leaving us only with our forces in the Core Worlds, the Empire can still commit itself to a retrenchment before using its superior manufacturing to reduce the periphery one world at a time.  They would run rampant for a few years, but I'm not sure they could parley that into any long-term advantage without taking extremely brutal measures that I do not believe their leadership had the political strength to utilize, and even if they did, would cost them any claim to that moral high ground that they were so fond of in their propaganda. 

Even if the Death Star were destroyed and, oh, let's go one step further and say that the loss of the Death Star also takes out Admiral Tarkin, Darth Vader, and all of the Joint Chiefs, who I should remind you were also aboard the Death Star, these people do not exist in a vacuum.  Even Darth Vader could be replaced, and though I suspect he would be the hardest to replace due to the trust invested in him back then, it may well turn out even better in the long run given his eventual treasonous actions and failure to replace Emperor Palpatine under those old-fashioned Sith rules.  For the remainder, replacements could be found and promoted from within the military and COMPNOR without too much difficulty.  There wouldn't be any significant dislocation of central authority without Palpatine himself dying, and I suspect he would never be foolish enough to leave his security envelope in Coruscant for any trivial reason. 

That said, the destruction of the Death Star would have one outright positive effect in my opinion.  In my opinion, Tarkin was a bit too trigger-happy with the thing during his tenure.  Alderaan had a popular government unstintingly opposed to the Empire, as was Chandrila.  Dac was the heart of the independent Rebel shipbuilding capabilities and, alien-dominated as it was by the Mon Calamari and Quarren, was almost certainly not going to be reconciled to the Empire.  Onderon was, however, in a state of open civil war, and would have been better served by direct materiel support to pro-Imperial parties.  Fear is all and good, but overuse of fear, especially if it's erratic or not applied in response to consistent stimuli, results in neurosis and even psychosis in extreme cases.  Moreover, destroying these worlds only denied their resources to the Empire.  That's all and fine in the case of Alderaan, but what if, as a hypothetical, a Rebel cell had somehow risen up and usurped the reins of power on Kuat or, one step further, Coruscant itself?  Destroying those worlds would have gutted the Empire, and failing to destroy those worlds would have shown the Tarkin Doctrine to be just words on the wind.  The Tarkin Doctrine was ultimately flawed, and its revision or, let's go one step further and suggest maybe even its outright abandonment may have come even sooner had the primary instrument of its implementation been destroyed. 
« Last Edit: August 17, 2016, 11:18:03 pm by Culise »
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Zanzetkuken The Great

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Re: DBWI: Death Star fails to destroy Yavin IV
« Reply #6 on: August 18, 2016, 12:09:14 am »

Oh I recognize that it would not be likely for the Empire to be overthrown, I'm just saying the aftermath would be more of a nightmare with the political opinion of the war temporarily shifting towards the rebels and causing the war to drag on for far longer than it did for us.  The protracted war might have wound up delaying or canceling some of the projects we dusted off to have us make Mincemeat of the Vong.  Yeah the Tarkin Doctrine should have been revised sooner, but dusting off some of the stuff produced for us made that little conflict go by fast.  If it wasn't quick...well, have you seen what was in some of the archives we recovered and translated?  Fighting with only the conventional navy and army would have been painful, much less one reduced by damage to shipyards and depletion of soldiers by a more lasting rebellion and possibly being initially distracted quelling the last sparks.  Heck, the infrastructure damage taken while we were mobilizing to defeat them might have dragged us into another rebellion in the aftermath.  Might have taken another generation or so before we got to the current level of stability we have.
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Re: DBWI: Death Star fails to destroy Yavin IV
« Reply #7 on: August 18, 2016, 12:55:44 am »

First off, not trying to pull the death star stunt again. Between the material and manpower lost when that thing blew up trying to build another one would be ruinous. Rather, we'd go back the the basics of imperial might; The imperial navy and imperial army. Only the emperor knows how much this station cost, and trying to build a second one would be disastrous.
THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS.
The Imperial Navy is the biggest, baddest, grandest fighting force in the galaxy, and the only one of real note, at that, of course. Now they just cook up all these giant apocalypse weapons and have them do pretty much all the work. Most of the navy barely got to fight at all in the Vong War. We've got all these incredible capital ships, so it feels so wrong that they've been so passive for the last couple of generations. I'm starting to wonder if I'm ever going to be called on to actually serve the Empire, or if I'm just gonna keep sitting up here looking pretty like everyone else in the Star Destroyers. I wouldn't terribly mind a universe when we're top of the heap. I know this isn't the Milpolitics thread, but... ugh, sorry, I just had to get that out of my system.

I really have to disagree with you on what our ability would have been to otherwise fight the Yuuzhan Vong without the superweapons -- they did a nice job taking out the Vong'd Rim planets, sure, but it's not like the Navy was a paperweight. The Navy would have been able to rain down sufficient destruction on Vong-stuff with the Star Destroyers, and we would have at least been able to be a bit selective. I know we only lost a couple of unimportant planets like Utapau, but it would have been a nice note in history to have gotten out of it without having to blow up any of our own planets, wouldn't it? There was no way the rebels would have had the raw firepower to weaken us even with Dac -- I'm pretty sure we could have just boiled them with enough capital weapons fire.
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